I've had my Kindle 2i for two weeks. This I've decided to return it and buy a Kindle 3 instead (with 3G). I've already bought a fair amount of books, some I've not even begun to read yet, most are from Amazon, but some are from other vendors. I want to make the migration to Kindle 3 as easy as possible. What should I think about? Is it enough to turn Wireless on and expect Amazon to have a complete backup available that I can take down when I receive the Kindle 3? Does that include the books from other vendors? Can I keep my Collections? What about Clippings, Bookmarks, Notes etc?

The books you bought from Amazon should be available for download when you get the new one. But the ones from other vendors will have to be loaded again. I use Calibre to manage my ebooks and highly recommend it! I believe that your clippings, etc are stored and will be transferred to the new Kindle, but I don't really use them so I'm not sure. I don't think that the collections are stored though, but again I'm not certain.

Amazon will keep a backup of all books you purchase from them, as well as bookmarks/notes/highlights/last page read which can be re-synced from the new Kindle provided you have the old one set to Backup Annotations in the settings.

You can easily re-download all your titles either via Whispernet, or directly from the Manage Your Kindle page on their website.

Your non-Amazon books you'll have to backup and transfer over yourself, and also the associated .mbp, .tan, and .plr files which keep the bookmarks etc. locally for those books.

You should also probably save a copy of your MyClippings.txt file manually, although I think the new Kindle might possibly regenerate it from the existing highlights when your books are copied back.

There's a way of transferring collections, which are not automatically carried over. One is detailed in the user guide which provides much better instructions about that I could. The other involves copying the .json file, which apparently houses info about one's collections, over manually.

Start by turning on your wireless so that Amazon can copy your notes and clippings for your Kindle books. Then copy your entire Documents folder from your Kindle to your computer. You can then delete any books you bought from Amazon (for me, those are all .azw and .tpz) and their associated .mbp files, but keep any samples (you can tell which are samples by sorting by file size). Samples aren't backed up at Amazon and they have no DRM. Amazon books do have DRM, and you'll need to re-download new versions for your K3, so you can delete those. Your notes and clippings on Amazon books are saved at Amazon; notes and clippings on non-Amazon books live in the .mpb files, so be sure to save those.

When you get your K3, copy your Documents folder back over, and use the Archive to download any books you want back on your Kindle right away. You can also copy your Collections, and any Amazon books on the device will go into their Collections, but you will probably need to re-do Collections on non-Amazon books.

Bear in mind that your books have a limited number of licenses (usually six), so you may not want to re-download all your books to your new Kindle, just the ones you want to read now. Unless, of course, you are comfortable removing the DRM at some point for archiving (not sure about the legality of that in Sweden but it's not a difficult process) or you aren't worried about someday losing access to them.

Edit: So I was just reading elsewhere that Amazon now releases your licenses when you deregister. I'm so glad they're doing this now. Before, they left the license with the device. So disregard my original post. Not that you might not still want to liberate your books from DRM in case you ever want to leave the Amazon ecosystem.

But returning my Kindle 2i will nullify the registrations for books on that device, no?

Yes, but just to be sure I would deregister either from the Kindle or on Amazon under Kindle Mgmt. I suppose it is possible Amazon would goof and sell your Kindle as a refurb with it still registered to you.